


Red Herring

by Metallic_Sweet



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: (see also: evil stoves), Ambition, Character Study, Dogs, Food Metaphors, Gen, Love at First Sight, M/M, Moral Ambiguity, Pre-Relationship, Snow and Ice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-18
Updated: 2016-10-18
Packaged: 2018-08-23 03:03:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8311513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Metallic_Sweet/pseuds/Metallic_Sweet
Summary: Victor Nikiforov is on top of the world.
He’s starving.





	

There are three rules that Victor has always followed.

One: smile. The smile must be appropriate for the situation. It may be light or knowing or sad, but it must always, always be charming. It must never be his real smile. That’s too wide. Too telling. Too effusive and far, far too bright. He learned that when he was little, when things were very different.

Two: don’t talk about the past. No one wants to hear about the past, not unless it’s something funny or relationship-related. No one wants to hear about things they already know. It won’t surprise them. 

And, three: always aim to surprise. People gravitate to what makes them curious. All the genius in the world won’t make up for being predictable. That’s boring. Once the audience is bored, they look elsewhere. Victor’s job is to figure out where they’re looking before they do.

If he doesn’t, then he’s just a genius. A genius is, in the end, as ordinary as everyone else.

He learned that when he was little, when things were very different.

 

In the dead of winter, the river running through Victor’s hometown freezes over.

Secretly, he has always dreamed of skating on it. It is, of course, not safe to do so. The ice is solid, but it is rough. He would get in the way of industrial transport. He would probably hurt himself. But, still, it is a dream. 

It’s not a dream that he tells anyone about. It’s too much of his past, and it’s so mundane that it would fail to be a surprise. He isn’t sure if he’d be able to control his own smile. Victor doesn’t think much about his hometown, mostly because he spends the majority of his life thinking about other things. He considers his flat in Moscow, which he owns everything in, his home. He moved his parents and little brother to St Petersburg a decade ago, and his little brother has gone to America for university. There is nothing in his hometown except nostalgia. He is not a nostalgic person.

Or he tries not to be. Some early mornings before training, he finds himself standing at the window of his kitchen. He looks down to the street, and he thinks about doing the same as he waited for his father to come back from the mines. In that tiny box of a flat, there was the kitchen, which was also the sitting room and foyer, the toilet and bath with no window, and the bedroom that they all shared. He thinks about his mother, who always smelled of fish in those days from her work at the market, telling him to stop touching the window.

“You’ll get frostbite,” she would chide, over and over. “Come here, come, it’s warm by the stove.”

It was an old stove. It groaned, creaked, and occasionally burnt his mother. Victor had been deeply frightened of it. In his first flat, which he bought at sixteen with Yakov as the guarantor, he asked far too many times if the bright blue and very modern stove made noise. Yakov had to pull him aside, scowling in the way that etched then-premature wrinkles all over his face.

“It’s electric,” he lectured, but it didn’t carry the heat of a scolding. “The only thing that should make noise is the extractor fan.”

Victor, even now, has never developed confidence in stoves. His current one, as with the rest of his flat, is top of the line, but he uses it only about once a month. He’s perfectly fine with cooking his vegetables in the microwave. He doesn’t use it at all if it’s competition season. Instead, he gives up on feeding himself and gets all of his meals catered. It prevents his nutritionist from having an aneurysm.

“Now if only you would cut out liquor,” both his general physician and nutritionist grumble. “Heart disease runs in your family, too, so….”

He leaves the physical with his certificate of wellness pending his blood tests’ full results and a folder of additional paperwork. A long list of dos and don’ts has already been forwarded to the catering company. His age, printed unassumingly at _26_ in the proper box at the top of the full physical printout, feels more pressing than it should.

“I will die,” Victor complains to Georgi as they sit in the practice facility sauna together. “I am not allowed to eat herring or cheese or pork—”

“I miss honey,” Georgi says, very morose.

“Well, you can chug an entire jar—”

Georgi’s towel beans him in the face. “That was _one_ time.”

“I feel old,” Victor admits to Makkachin as they lie on the couch together that evening.

Makkachin breathes in his face. There’s a distinctly fishy smell from the new treats. Victor thinks about herring again. The treat bag advertised salmon.

He tucks his arms around Makkachin’s neck. He looks up at the ceiling. It’s smooth. Off-white. Plain. The same colour as the walls. It’s very in. Very functional. Very minimalist. 

Victor swallows. Blinks. Once. Twice. He fists his hands in Makkachin’s warm fur.

“I’m starving.”

 

The truth is Victor is greedy.

What is good to everyone else is not good enough. Even in the earliest days of his skating, when he was outperforming everyone in his age group by leaps and bounds, there was this feeling. A boiling in his blood. It made him into a dog chasing its tail. He was more than a little mad. He was just barely manageable, and, on bad days, impossible. It was only by virtue of the prestige he brought to the skating school that he was tolerated. 

“You stupid boy!” Yakov would shout as soon as the cameras and microphones were gone; he was harsher in those days; everyone was. “You will hurt yourself, and you will regret it!”

This is only half true. Victor does hurt himself. It’s a regular occurrence. Blisters, bunions, broken nails. He’s crashed, fallen, flipped over walls to land face-first on the floor. His feet are battered maps of his career. There is growing evidence of wear and tear on his bones in the occasional X-rays he’s had to have over the years. 

But he doesn’t regret it. Good isn’t good enough. He has to make sacrifices. It’s why all his relationships outside of the professional fail. No one is able to keep up. No one can satisfy him. No one is willing to try.

“You stupid boy!” Yakov shouts over music, which reverberates in the otherwise empty practice rink. “It’s two in the morning!”

Victor doesn’t stop. He spins. Jumps. Breathes. His feet hurt. His heart hammers. Yakov shouts at him. His blood is boiling.

“Don’t you have a dog waiting for you?” Yakov snarls as Victor gingerly pulls off his socks to inspect his feet. 

Makkachin greets him enthusiastically when he hobbles home at just before four. They spend the next hour sitting on the floor of the bathroom with the first aid kit as Victor treats his feet. It takes an hour because he spends the majority of it with his face buried in Makkachin’s fur, breathing in that reassuring dog scent to psyche himself up to finish applying antiseptic. 

He hobbles back to the rink four hours later where Yakov yells at him again and forces him to sit out practice by stepping on his right foot. It hurts badly enough that Victor yells, too, before he can stop himself. It proves Yakov’s point. He hurt himself.

But, as he sits and watches the rest of the school skate, he doesn’t regret it. He doesn’t regret anything that he sacrifices. He is greedy. Good isn’t good enough.

And, now, his body isn’t keeping up. He is twenty-seven, and he is on top of the world, but only so long as he can continue winning the same things he has won before. There’s nothing new about that. There’s no way to surprise with that. Winning, in the way he has been, has gone stale. Skating, in the way he has been, has gone stale. It’s all too connected to the past. It’s getting harder and harder to smile.

He’s reached the peak of his own genius, and it’s just as he’s always suspected:

He’s just as ordinary as everyone else.

 

Three weeks later, Georgi links him to a viral video of Katsuki Yuuri skating on Youtube.

Watching it for the tenth time, Victor swallows. Blinks. Once. Twice. 

He tightens his hands. On his phone. On his hair. Makkachin shifts. Presses a paw deep into Victor’s stomach. Growls.

He’s starving.


End file.
